


and not burn

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2016 [16]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Apocalypse, Buffy Insert, Demon Buffy, F/M, Guilt, Not Beta Read, Post Season 5, Prompt Fic, Second person POV, Sequel, Supernatural Kinda Angstfest, Wishlist_Fic, what even
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 15:24:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8922340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: In which you wait for the end of the world and it doesn't come and that might be the worst thing.
(Wishlist Day 16, Sequel to this.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Gingermenace, who asked for a BtVS/SPN sequel to _Eleven Glimpses_ (linked in the summary), post escape. Read that one first, this makes zero sense without it.

+

You wait.

For days, for weeks, for months, you wait for the sky to turn black, for the rivers to boil red, for children to speak in tongues, and plagues to sweep over the earth. 

You wait for the end of what you began, for the punishment for all your sins. 

You wait for Dean to shake his head one final time, too disappointed to get past it yet again, for Bobby to sigh and give up, for Cas to take flight and never come back. 

You wait for the end of the world.

It never comes. 

+

Cas tells you about the horsemen, about the war, the sickness, the hunger that should be ravaging humanity, laying waste to civilizations by now. 

It never happens.

He tells you about Death, bound eons ago, the ritual to return him to corporeal form, the signs and omens. 

They don’t appear.

Death stays the thing that sneaks into hospital rooms and kills people, rather than a man with a ring. 

Bobby obsessively reads Revelations, finds a new horror every day and tells you over breakfast, almost conversationally. By the way, locusts might come up. I have this codex that says they will eat the flesh off the bones of every living thing. Nice, huh? Shouldn’t have been so damn stupid, Sam.

Nothing. 

Silence.

Stillness.

To you, it’s worse than the actual end of the world would have been.

+

“Maybe it was all a giant goddamn fluke and the Devil never got out,” your brother theorizes, drunk off his head again, staring at you with mom’ eyes again. 

You don’t remember that, you just know from the photographs he keeps tucked away where he thinks you’ll never find them. 

Him and mom and their identical eyes and you ruined that, too. 

Ruined your family, ruined countless lives, and then called the Devil down on what was left. 

Except the Devil didn’t come. 

+

“I believe Lucifer has taken a vessel,” Cas tells you, late at night, over beer. He drinks now. It’s almost funny. 

Almost. 

“I thought I’m his vessel,” you say, flatly, and hate the way you almost feel jealous. It’s you, it’s you, it’s you. It’s always been you. It’s the only way you’ve ever been special. 

You hate yourself a little more for even thinking it. 

That, and all the ‘almosts’ in your life. 

“Only counts with hand grenades, Sammy.”

“His true vessel, yes. But there are other, lesser bloodlines that could suffice. Jimmy Novak had cousins who would have suited me ill, but served me for a time. I have searched the earth for your distant blood-kin. It was difficult, because your bloodlines are so old, tracing back to Cain and Abel themselves, but I believe I found something.”

“Whoa,” Dean interrupts, hands up. “Cain and Abel? Are you stoned, Cas? Are we actually talking about…”

“The first sons of Adam and Eve, yes. You see my dilemma. You are technically distantly related to almost every living human on earth.”

“Cain and Abel?” Dean shouts.

Bobby smacks him. You pretend to chuckle at that and feel your gut twist because you know, you know that your line has to be that of Cain. Brother slayer. World killer. The first murderer with a mark he could never erase or hide. Maybe that’s it. Maybe the Devil in your blood is that mark. 

Cas waves an impatient hand, a gesture he learned from Dean. He has yet to copy a single mannerism from you, despite spending almost as much time around you as around your brother. 

“The name of the man I think might be his temporary vessel is Nick. He lost his family a short while ago and has recently disappeared. There were omens.”

“Omens? That’s all you got, Cas? It’s a bit thin.”

“If I’m right, we know the Devil’s face, Dean. That is more than we had before.” 

Was Castiel always capable of anger? Of frustration? Or did he learn that, too?

Dean sighs, clinks his bottle against the angel’s companionably in apology. “Okay, man. Okay.”

+

The Devil is a blond. Somehow, that strikes you as funny. Neil Gaiman got that much right. 

+

It’s Bobby who comes up with the idea of a summoning. By name alone you couldn’t call him. “But now we know whose body he wears, we can summon him by blood, too.”

“Yeah? Whose?”

Nick had a daughter. She was barely a year old when she died and her body is tiny, a husk, a wisp. Digging her up feels as big a crime and releasing the Devil did. 

“Jesus,” Dean curses, digs, sips from a flask, digs more. 

She was a baby. And they steal her DNA to summon the Devil in her father’s body. 

“Alright,” Dean drawls on the long drive back to Bobby’s. “We summon the Devil. And then what?”

+

It’s been three months and the world is still turning. 

A blond man with a strange skin condition – it’s almost like he’s burning, my dear – shows up randomly, causes a bit of chaos and disappears again. 

You dream, sometimes, of darkness and long blonde hair, of laughter and Las Vegas lights, of trees and blood and small towns and the Empire State Building, the Chinese Wall, a Diwali festival in India. You’re never quite sure if they’re real, or just your imagination. 

You don’t tell anyone about them. 

+

There is a demon by the name of Crowley and he is scared shitless of the status quo changing. It’d be funny, if it weren’t so pathetic. 

He gives you the gun that once cost your father his life and tells you to keep his name out of the press. 

You have a little girl’s blood, a dead man’s name, the Devil’s sigils and a weapon that can kill anything.

So you summon Lucifer MorningStar into Bobby Singer’s living room. 

+

The sky doesn’t get dark, the earth doesn’t shake. Nothing much happens when Bobby finishes his incantation, except that, suddenly, there’s a man standing in the devil’s trap and holy oil in the middle of the room.

He is blond and his face is flaking off, like he is burning from the inside out. 

He sighs, frowns at the circle of fire trapping him and snaps his fingers. The oil disappears out of existence and the fire dies. 

Dean takes aim, exhales slowly and shoots the man straight in the head. 

_Doom._

The body drops and every living thing in the room holds its breath.

Waiting.

After a full minute, the Devil sits up like nothing is wrong, rubs his forehead and, with a flick of his wrist, summons the Colt to him, bending the barrel out of shape with his bare hands. “Hasn’t anyone told you not to touch the grown ups’ toys, Dean?”

“What the – how are you not dead? That’s the fucking Colt!”

Lucifer rolls his eyes as he gets to his feet, casually toeing at the edges of the devil’s trap that is obviously doing nothing to contain him. He sticks his hands in his pockets, shrugs. “And I’m an archangel, kiddo.”

“You’re the Devil,” you correct, because he can’t possibly, can he? After all this time, after all his crimes, he can’t still be – 

The thing in Nick’s body steps over the lines of paint and sigils, trapping you against the far wall with nothing but his presence, no magic, no demon powers, locking you in until you’re chest to chest and you can smell that he had curry for lunch. 

“Sam,” he croons, and it’s soft and gentle and you want to scream, but can’t. 

“Sweet Sam. Are you going to let me in?”

Dean lunges at Lucifer from behind and gets smacked down like a naughty puppy. Bobby fires a shotgun and the buckshot doesn’t even touch skin. Cas wields his blade and gets flung out into the hallway. 

The devil never takes his eyes off you. “Did you like the dreams I sent you? All the things we could do, you and me. Whaddaya say, Sammy?”

You cringe at the name, Dean’s name for you, a childhood memory, dripping from those peeling, burning lips. 

“Luci?” The voice is female and since you’re the only one still facing the trap, you’re the only one to see the blonde girl appear, a confused scrunch of the nose and a whirlwind of energy. “Where’d you go?”

Everyone spins to face her, including the Devil. You sidle past him until you’re shoulder to shoulder with your brother, who mouths, “Luci?” at you, incredulously.

“I was summoned, my dear. Nothing to worry about.”

She frowns again, that girl, and tries to take a step toward Lucifer, only to be stopped by the trap. Her eyes flare brightly, but not black, and she hisses. Looks confused. 

Doesn’t she know what she is?

She looks at Lucifer, who shrugs and snaps his fingers again, wiping the trap out of existence as easily as the oil. She sighs happily, eyes fading back to a regular green. “Can we go now?”

In the doorway, Cas inhales sharply, head cocked to one side, the way he does when he’s seeing something beyond human sight. “You are the lost slayer.”

She flinches. Hard. Pushes forward and presses against the Devil’s side. He slings a casual arm around her shoulder and scowls at Castiel. Technically, you realize, Cas is the Devil’s little brother. 

Oh God. 

“Lost?” she asks.

“All slayers go to Heaven,” Cas explains. She flinches again at that word. Slayer. What’s a slayer, besides the obvious? “Their sacrifice and suffering ensures it. But there is one missing, one that never could be found no matter how long we scoured the realms of man. Twenty-five years ago, she disappeared and her soul was never found.”

Twenty-five. She mouths the number to herself. 

“Only twenty-five?” she asks, looking at Lucifer. 

“Up here,” he corrects. “But you were with me, sweetheart. It’s been centuries for you. Time moves faster the deeper you get in the pit. And there’s nothing deeper than my cage.”

This time, it’s Dean who flinches.

The girl, demon, slayer, shrugs. Turns back to Cas. “There was an open gate to hell and it wouldn’t close without a sacrifice.”

“But your soul should have ascended the moment your body died.” Cas frowns. He frowns so often these days. 

Lucifer lets go of her only to step behind her, running both hands from her shoulders down to her ribs, around to settle on her hips, provocative and possessive. She leans into it. “This? Little brother, this all original parts. She never died.”

Silence drops like a stone.

You try to imagine centuries in hell with a body that can be hurt. Can’t imagine it. Don’t want to. 

Cas looks sick, Dean is white as a sheet. Bobby keeps aiming his shotgun and lowering it, unsure. Knowing that it’ll do no harm, probably. Archangels and demons in their original bodies. Is she even a demon? Her eyes aren’t black, for all that they’re not quite human. The trap stopped her, but she’s not possessing a body, but wearing her own. What does hell do to flesh and blood? What does it do to little girls who sacrifice themselves to save the world?

“Can we go now?”

“A moment.” The Devil holds up a finger, turns back to you and Dean. Her gaze follows and her eyes widen. She looks cute. Young. Innocent. You make a mental note to grill Cas on slayers. 

Later.

If you survive this. 

“I saw you, once,” she calls, surprised. “On the racks! You were Al’s favorite! Are you a demon?” 

Dean twitches back, his face somewhere between agony and longing and you look away, because you remember Alastair and what you did to him, what he did to Dean and what Dean didn’t do to him. You remember that sometimes, demons see your brother’s face and for just a moment, they hesitate. 

“No. No, I’m not.”

Her shoulders slump. “Oh. Sorry. I thought… I’m not like the others. They’re all creepy and dumb and slow and I thought….”

“It’s because you walked in voluntarily, with your body. Made you different, sweetheart.” Lucifer sounds almost patient as he explains, like a father to a child. There is nothing fatherly in how he slips fingers under the edge of her shirt and holds on. 

She pouts childishly. Whatever – whoever – she once was, she’s not sane now. Not whole. “So you’ve said, but it would have been nice if there were someone else like me.”

“What am I, chopped liver?”

“No, you’re the freaking LightBringer. Not the same.”

He shrugs it off. “Whatever. So, Sammy? You in?”

You shake your head, ignore the siren song in your blood, say, “No. I’ll never say yes to you. I won’t help you end the world.”

“No apocalypse,” the slayer pipes up. “We made a deal.”

“A deal?” Bobby echoes, giving up on his gun, finally. There’s the Devil standing in his living room, a little maybe-demon girl by his side and the world isn’t ending, yet. 

Lucifer slaps a hand over the girl’s mouth. “The details of which are none of your business, boys. I’m not ending the world at this point. We eat a lot of ice-cream, instead. Now. Who wants to die first?”

Immediately, you all fall back into fighting stances. 

“Hey! No killing them!”

“They shot me! It hurt!”

“You big baby! You got better. No killing them.”

“But!”

“No! That one’s your vessel, right? You can’t kill your vessel. And he’ll never say yes if you kill his family.”

The devil actually pouts. “Yes, I can.”

“No, you can’t.”

“I can bring him back.”

The girl – you need to find out her name, from Cas, maybe – digs her fists into her hips, every inch the irate wife. Dean, despite himself, chuckles. “No. He won’t forgive you and this meat isn’t holding up much longer. So play nice.”

He shrugs. “I can make Nick last.”

“Not forever.”

Something crosses the Devil’s face, something raw and twisted and _hurt_ and he says, lowly, “I won’t need him forever.”

And then he grabs her by the arm and they’re gone. 

+

You dream, that night, of a mirror in an empty room and your own reflection talking to you. You got drunk with Dean in hopes of avoiding exactly this, but you’re not surprised it didn’t work. 

“Hey there, Sammy,” your reflection says, moving your face in a way it’s never been moved before. 

You feel sea sick.

“Lucifer,” you echo, counter, greet, curse. “Are you really not going to do it?”

End the world. 

You don’t need to say it.

“Not yet,” he allows. Shakes his head. “I’ll burn all of creation, Sammy boy, don’t you worry. I’ll burn it and have myself some s’mores as it goes, but not yet.”

“Why?”

“Why will the Devil end the world?” he asks, mockingly.

“No. Why not now?”

He smiles, then, and it’s your face, but the light is all him and you understand, you understand, suddenly, why he was once called the most beautiful of all God’s angels. 

He shines brighter than the sun. 

“Because she lives. For now, she lives.”

She. The girl. Buffy Anne Summers. She was seventeen when she walked into hell to save the world. Now she murders, dances and laughs her way across five continents with the Devil as her companion. 

“And when she dies?” You ask, already knowing the answer. 

Lucifer’s smile turns sharp. “The world burns.”

+

You wake up shaking.

“Thank you,” you whisper into the predawn light.

It becomes your ritual. Every morning you wake and there is no fire, you thank her. Every morning she lives, so do you.

And you know you don’t deserve it, but you’re grateful.

+

(You don’t age anymore. It takes years for you to notice, but you know it’s the Devil’s doing and you know why. Because one day, a green-eyed maybe-demon girl is going to die and that day, the Devil will need his vessel.

But not yet. 

Not yet.)

+

**Author's Note:**

> Come tumble with me [here](http://www.wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).


End file.
